Edward Gallagher, 40, started Salty Frog Gear, which he describes as a “coastal lifestyle brand with an edge.” The brand, launched with Nine Line and Black Rifle Coffee Company, includes items with the print “stay salty” and sweatshirts with pockets that can hold a bottled beverage.
…
“As someone who served with Eddie and other members of SEAL team 7 downrange, I know the truth about the character of a man unjustly targeted by a broken investigation and corrupt prosecution,” the company’s founder, Tyler Merritt, said in a statement to the Times. “Nike has their First Amendment right to make individuals such as Colin Kaepernick their brand ambassadors. We have the right to make patriots like Chief Gallagher one of ours.”
Gallagher has also opened an online shop to make fun of the Navy and the SEALs who testified against him, calling them “mean girls,” according to the Times. The Times last week reviewed and reported on footage of those who turned in the platoon leader in which they call him “freaking evil,” “toxic” and a “psychopath.“
So, this is a war criminal bad enough that SEALs were willing to testify against him, in no small part due to how his actions directly endangered them alongside him. He had a reputation as a hard-charging door-kicker even before being sent downrange, and as the Times reported, some of the members of the SEAL teams he was with were excited by this, were looking forward to serving with someone who would get them into combat more and more.
However, Gallagher became known for deliberately botching operations in order to get into gunfights, directing machine gun fire at villages out of boredom more than anything, for shooting a pregnant woman intentionally, for slitting the throat of a prisoner before posing with the body, that pose being the one crime he was committed of.
This exposes two vital things about the way that “operator culture” spreads in America and throughout the military: Gallagher’s reputation for enjoying combat meshes very nicely with the sentiment expressed by Black Rifle Coffee Company’s founder, whose memoir proclaims that it is for those who want to “know they’re okay for being okay”, those soldiers who not only are not afflicted with PTSD, but in fact supporting a notion that this should be the new expectation, that soldiers in these forever wars should take a sense of purpose and pride from killing in the name of empire.
Gallagher being called these things, toxic and psychopathic and evil, exposes not only how depraved his own actions were, but how necessary exceptions like Gallagher are to creating the culture of American militancy. The SEALs testifying against him have numbed themselves to the acts they commit, by necessity separate their ideation of themselves from the acts they commit. It involves denying just what operators like SEALs do for a living, ignoring that actions similar to Gallagher’s are not just things they do, but the express purpose of their unit’s existence. As special operations forces are more and more the language in which American empire speaks, as the shift toward understanding most infantry as merely an occupying army with combat delegated to a select few selected and fetishized, in competition with similar units from the other branches of the military.
Their representation in media like the newer editions of the Call of Duty franchise (where characters are either part of units-within-units, elites-among-elites, or find themselves quickly plucked from conventional units and transformed into these instruments of empire) or Rainbow Six (a unit named such because it pulls operators from various national sources, akin to the heavy use of Canadian and Norwegian special forces during the early days of the War in Afghanistan) depicts their work as world-saving and selfless, when it so often involves the mundane, the maintenance of conditions of imperial domination. Killing and killing often is their job, and even then Gallagher was unsettlingly invested in the practice thereof, was violating the taboos set out by a unit already operating in violation of certain taboos around what acceptable means of combat are, what the role of a soldier or warfighter is.
These companies are incredibly mainstream, are companies that average people see nothing wrong with patronizing. The way that gun culture, conservative politics, and such “veteran-owned” companies inform one another creates the kind of “thin blue line” ideology that so often surrounds discussion of the police, of the militarization of police forces, how these forces direct their violence inwards onto the populations they supposedly protect. The fetishization of the veteran, the way that veteran status is seen as creating a kind of irreproachable figure allows for the creation of Pete Buttegig, a candidate so unremarkable that it is itself remarkable, whose craven careerism lead to his decision to join the Naval Reserve and work in intelligence before entering politics. Buttegig seems to at least acknowledge implicitly that it was just this, a career move, resume building, rather than understanding it as some kind of noble calling like the founder of BRCC wants to sell it. Appealing to aimlessness, an inability to afford college or housing, is how much of the Working Class will see the military more than 18 years after 9/11, the patriotic fervor long gone. Meanwhile, the creation of an officer class akin to that seen with the buying of commissions, new Kennedys graduating Ivies and entering the military to acquire the mark of veteran status before moving on to their actual career in neoliberal politics should not be surprising.
Gallagher is an extension of this, is the epitome thereof: the culture that defends cops, that pays their legal fees sight-unseen, that assumes an officer’s innocence to the point where gun manufacturers create programs such that they will send a replacement firearm for temporary use if an officer’s is taken as evidence in a shooting, where police are assumed to be in the right or eventually justified as such, where war criminals can use their experience as a selling point, where you can become a celebrity for being convicted of war crimes or for being part of an “officer-involved” shooting. It is a culture of militancy, of fascism, one which makes it rather hard to argue that contemporary right-wing gun culture presents much of a threat to hegemony given that the authority that such guns would be turned against are so friendly with the ones that make such guns.
That so many within gun circles see little, if anything, wrong with this, are willing to support companies that create and maintain this ideological space, are so willing to support the police and military, is a genuine problem. The way that gun owners talk about the ATF, about Ruby Ridge or Waco, about no-knock raids and SWAT killings, needs to be expanded into a wider critique of how police operate and how police, military, and paramilitary organizations maintain hegemony even if they come into conflict at times, how the militia movement’s right-wing character shows a willingness to support the ideology of the state even when claiming opposition to it, a desire to restructure the same ideals into privately-held reproductions of the same, the question of exactly how one should oppose or criticize this when it is so pervasive is one that must be asked.
Here’s what’s happening in Australia at the moment.
For some context: Mallacoota is a tourist town, usual population is a little over 1000, but at peak tourist times, it can be as high as 8000.
There was an estimated 4000 there today, when the extreme heat, peaking at 49C/120F, combined with high winds, to spark a large, intense fire in the bushland around the area. This pretty much blocked off all ways out of the town, leading to all 4000 people being evacuated to the beach, with the emergency plan basically being “If the fire comes this way, get in the water”
Thankfully, the wind did change direction, and as far as I’ve heard, most of the town was spared, but this is how bad the drought, heat, and fire situations have become in australia.
And our government still refuses to make solid policies on climate change.
This escape from house arrest is crazy. A paramilitary group from Lebanon showed up at his house posing as a Gregorian orchestra. They smuggled him out in a case for a musical instrument. Then he was taken by a series of private jets to Lebanon, which does not have an extradition treaty with Japan. The whole thing was arranged by his wife in London.
On this day, 2 January 1920, the start of the second Palmer Raids, an attempt by the US Department of Justice to arrest and deport radical workers and leftists, especially anarchists. Some 6000 were arrested and held without trial on January 2nd, and although most were released without charge, more than 500 foreign citizens were deported, among them most famously Emma Goldman.
You can read more about it in Goldman’s fascinating autobiography, here: https://libcom.org/library/emma-goldman-living-my-lifehttps://www.facebook.com/workingclasshistory/photos/a.296224173896073/1312053938979753/?type=3
This blog is mostly so I can vent my feelings and share my interests. Other than that, I am nothing special.
If you don't like Left Wing political thought and philosophy, all things related to horror, the supernatural, the grotesque, guns or the strange, then get the fuck out. I just warned you.
